Poetical interlude

[hatam_soferet]

I went to a talk at the Jewish Theological Seminary a while back, on the poetry of Yehuda haLevi. Specifically, two translators were talking about their approaches to translating haLevi’s poetry.

Those of us who work with Bible translations frequently have occasion to remark that translations are necessarily also commentaries, and this talk emphasised the commentarial nature of any translation, but from a more artistic perspective, which I found striking.

In particular, one got a fine sense of how these two translators take a poem and get inside it, inside the language and the words and as far as they can inside the mind of the poet – and having got there, they then describe what they see.

Here’s the first lines of the example they used:

הבא מבול ושם תבל חרבה
ואין לראות פני ארץ חרבה
ואין אדם ואין חיה ואין עוף
הסף הכל ושכנו מעצבה

Of course, what they see from the inside of the poem depends upon who they are, so what they choose to communicate and the manner of said communication varies tremendously. Scheindlin translates “Is this the Flood, and has the world been drowned? / You can’t see land, or beast, or bird, or man. / Are they all finished, lying in the pit of sorrow?” But Halkin translates “Has a new Flood drowned the land / And left no patch of dry ground, / Neither bird, beast, nor man? / Has nothing remained?”

This was interesting of itself, but it also gave me a perspective on artistic representation that is probably standard fare for any fine arts undergraduate, but since I make a living as an artist of sorts without the benefit of a university education in the arts, I had to learn it this way.

Specifically, the Hebrew poem spoke to these two translators in different ways. One was most struck by, and most focused on conveying, the poet’s use of rhythm and meter, and in his translation he tried to represent that. The other was more focused on the images and the power in the poem, and his translation spoke of that.

Accordingly, it made me think about illustrating a poem – as an artistic calligrapher, one’s job is to convey a piece of text visually, and one goes through a similar process. Sometimes you might want your writing to convey the imagery and feeling you get from the text, but sometimes you might want to use pattern and structure to convey a visual echo of the text’s own structure. A calligraphic rendition of something is also a translation, in a way, and as such it is also a form of commentary.

The sifrei kodesh, of course, have a strongly-defined mode of rendition, meaning that a scribe-artist’s capacity for commentary is severely limited. In ancient times, when the concept of writing was still new, I understand that the scribe’s role was frequently one of embellisher as well as transmitter, but today’s scribe does not have that aspect. Scribes do have some room for individual expression, and in fact I shall be exploring that in a session at Limmud UK, subsequently appearing on this blog, but on the whole, not nearly as much as does an artist-calligrapher.

In any case, I had not conceived of, or articulated, my calligraphic activities in quite this way before, and I shall be bearing it in mind next time I do something creative I’m not expecting anything profound, but perhaps it will serve towards understanding whatever it is I presently do instinctively. Cheers, JTS.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.